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What is The Salty Professor?
Follow Virgil Henry as he shares tales from his 30 years of experience as a professor in America's higher education system. Listen as he comments on the good, bad, and ugly aspects of doing time in the "Ivory Tower."The Salty Professor aims at the state of Higher Education and fires away with abandon. All the tea shall be spilled.
June 21 2024
The Professor Who Cried Academic Freedom
There are a lot of lazy as fuck colleagues of mine who like to claim they have academic freedom when it comes to using the same, boring, 50-year-old, bullshit lessons because they can say whatever they want inside their own classrooms.
I guess, if we squint, we can see that as academic freedom. Really, what academic freedom means is that a faculty member is allowed to use h/i/er (a generic pronoun I like to use to represent her, his, and their), personal expertise to teach the subject. They are allowed to express opinions, if they are labeled as such, and, most importantly, they can have an open and honest debate about everything and anything.
Academia is a place where ideas bloom and grow and other flowering metaphors. So, clearly something old, boring, and dusty as fuck, isn’t flowery and new, but OK. If you want to pretend that is worth protecting, then fine, use your tenure and your bullshit to claim academic freedom is under attack. Reasonable people can agree that teachers should adapt to meet the students needs AND they should innovate.
However, because lazy, dusty, fucking fuckers cry academic freedom over bullshit like being asked to update material, or about being ‘forced” to use a universal syllabus template for accessibility and consistency purposes or any other myriad things they complain about to resist change and remain lazy, boring, and dusty, when the real issue arises, people don’t listen.
In Florida, Academic Freedom is under attack. Well, it isn't just in Florida. Anywhere that white assholes are desperately clinging to power, Academic Freedom is under attack, but Florida has really found a way to not just attack it, but kill it for good.
That asshole governor doesn’t like being called an asshole so with is Stop WOKE Act (I am not making that up), he claims that faculty of state-run colleges and universities, who are in fact state employees can’t, legally, say anything untoward against the government. Of course, law suits have been filed, but the person who is defending the laws, Chuck Cooper, says, “professors [can] not offer—or espouse, I should say, and endorse—viewpoints that are contrary to the states.”
When a judge asked him, “Could a legislature prohibit professors from saying anything negative about a current gubernatorial administration?”
Cooper replied: “I think, your honor, yes, because in the classroom the professor’s speech is the government’s speech and the government can restrict professors on a content-wide basis and restrict them from offering viewpoints.”
Let. That. Sink. In.
Holy. Fucking. Shit.
This is the real attack on academic freedom, but because for decades, faculty members were unwilling to make any changes even when it was best for their students, shit like this happens because after crying “Academic Freedom” over, and over, and fucking over, we’ve been swallowed by the wolf.